Pug’s Place

Similar to Jim Thompson here, CitizenShift of Canada has asked for permission to play my video “What Is Free Culture” at their “Autonomous Media Night” in Montréal on 3 May 2006. Unlike Jim, I don’t mind them playing my short, despite it’s obvious flaws in structure in the last 70 seconds.

(According to the request email, CitizenShift is “a space for independent and emerging media makers offering a unique on-line platform for the discussion of important social issues through video, audio, images and text.”)

Spring Break was fun, but recapping some of the adventures therein belongs in a different post. Of course the old adage that ‘what happens in Vegas stays in Vegas’ may be applicable, we’ll see. Maybe I’ll mention the bar fight in Margaritaville at 1 am. Hmm.

I’ve spent much too much time doing homework and project-work this week and not nearly enough time playing Sid Meier’s “Pirates!” (which is, by the way, awesome) and coding on Gpremacy. More later.

According to an interview with Joss Whedon in the latest issue of Entertainment Weekly, Firefly/Serenity is over. Amusingly, today’s the DVD release of Serenity. Coincidence?

Anyway, it looks like the saga has ended.

…At least they can’t take the sky from me.

No, I’m not dead. I’m merely finishing up projects and papers. I’ll be posting more once I give my last presentation tomorrow. That last presentation is on Gpremacy, and I’m showing a 2 minute video of multi-player gameplay which I had the great fun horrible time of making yesterday. Xvidcap can’t seem to capture more than 220 frames in one shot before slowing down to grabbing one frame every 5 seconds or so. This spelled doom for my 1000 frame demo — I had to re-simulate portions, start over several times and even fake one shot with the GIMP. A real pain. Then the added pain: encoding those demo screen captures to a video which Microsoft Windows Media Player can play naively. WMP SUCKS!

So, now, about Billy Joel… I ran across a column on MSN Slate this morning (via Findory) about the man which interested me, titled Billy Joel: Oh, the squandered genius!. It’s a little critique about Joel’s drive to be an “artiste” and how it has gotten in the way of his music. Anyway, I was interested and now feel a need to acquire more Elvis Costello music.
Side note: it appears Intel is dropping the ‘Pentium’ name. Instead, it appears we’ll eventually be able to install Fedora Core X on a Intel Core Y computer. Cute.

I’ve moved all my sites over to my new server now, and one of those was the Choctawhatchee Wordsmiths‘ page. After copying it, I couldn’t resist reading though some of my old poetry on that site and pulling choice bits out to entertain you, my viewers.

First, I want to point you to An ode to loneliness or damaged goods or the futility of waiting too long or not long enough, a poem I wrote for a D&D game. This was the “poem about how to write poetry” which Puggles, the Bard, used to instruct Carmen’s Dwarven Berzerker. One of its gems is undeniably the last stanza:

The emperor had those great new clothes
so people stopped to stare,
the same as when they view this prose –
in either case there’s nothing there.

Along the same lines is a resentment-filled poem titled Unilateral Poetry! (Anything Else is Fluff). This is the product of an interesting writing prompt in my Honors Poetry Writing class and an annoying critique in the same. The prompt was to use the end-words from a famous poem. The critique was that my poetry doesn’t discuss things of the heart, and it could use more ’soul’. The result, I think you will find, is very entertaining. I won’t copy the whole thing into this entry, so read it here.

I also have This Poem Is About Death, a tribute to Mrs. Smith, the IB English teacher who reconstructed my love of our language. She also happens to be the source of my stand-by poetry explanation: “this poem…. is about death.” You can state that about any poem, and This Poem Is About Death proves it:

Happy bunnies bounce
Happily down their cute hill
Into the peaceful sunset.

Many of you have heard stories about my first roommate, Josh (of Josh and the No-Names “fame,” if you listened to his prattle). I’ve even written a poem about him, titled Prisoner of Courtesy.

And then there are things like the Forgetful Limerick:

The Doc said “you have Alzheimer’s.
I’m really sorry, old-timer.”
The patient looked flushed,
And then he seemed crushed,
For Doc offered to send a reminder!

If you’re sick of homework, checking out the Wordsmiths Website again is a very entertaining way to spend some time.

A final note, credit (and blame) for being my Editor-in-chief goes to Lady Vulcan.

Spring Break is now over, and it finished on a fun sheet of notes! Tonight I saw Glenn Yarbrough & the Folk Reunion, the Brothers Four and the Kingston Trio perform at the Phillips Center — and gosh, I enjoyed it. Out of the whole montage there were only three original group members performing, but all of the replacements were at various points playing with original members of the respective groups (I hope that sentence made sense).

Before intermission Glenn Yarbrough and the Brothers Four played, but sadly there was a disturbing amount of incompetence shown by the technical staff and several of the microphones were never turned on, and the performers finally asked for the stage monitors to be completely shut off as they were getting feedback loops. Rick Dougherty’s banjo drowned out the rest of the instruments and his microphone only wanted to pick up his high notes, so that meant his solos were lacking (for content!). Very sad! When the Brothers Four came on stage they started out by trying to find the best microphones out there and learned that only three of the six would work, so they were in trouble from the start. They made a great crack about how they were going to be getting on eBay during intermission to purchase new mikes and audio equipment! I’m sure the stage crew was happy about that jab…

Most of the music from these two groups I did not recognize or only recognized in a vague way, which is sad since several of those songs were obviously great pieces of music. Glenn, in between songs, gave a little background about the start of folk music’s popularity here (since he was involved in it, all the way back in the 40s!). Most of it was information that passes from your mind as quickly as it enters, but I was amused to learn that Glenn found his love of folk music after hearing Woody Guthrie sing at his college, and that after the show a series of unexpected events led Woody, Glenn and a couple pals back to Glenn’s place to learn and sing folk tunes until 5 AM the next day. Amazing, really!

The intermission lasted what seemed like forever — but really about 30 minutes. I read news on my cell phone and read the programme for the next thing I’m seeing at the Phillips Center, the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra on Tuesday (a Suite from Prokofiev’s Romeo and Juliet and Brahms’ Symphony No. 1 in C Minor, Op 68). Apparently the intermission lasted until people stopped buying CDs and getting autographs in the foyer, but I didn’t see this with my own eyes.

The Kingston Trio, or rather, their successors, took the stage after the intermission and promptly George Grove’s banjo broke a string during The Tijuana Jail! They kept going, and George restrung and re-tuned the banjo before the song ended — and got a large amount of applause for it. Bob Hawoth mirthfully remarked that “It’s unfair that (George) got an ovation for an equipment failure!” George quickly replied, “Too bad that’s not how it goes in my bedroom…” (chuckle!). Oh, and Bill Zorn said that they had found new microphones on eBay during intermission, but expedited shipping wasn’t expedited enough… On and off there were sound-balance problems even for the Kingston Trio, but that didn’t stop some fun stories and good songs. Charlie and the MTA, El Matador, Tom Dooley, Where Have All The Flowers Gone (sadly I learned that Mary is in the hospital now with Leukemia), and several more that I don’t remember at present — oh, it was fun! They might not have been the real Kingston Trio, but that didn’t make them any less entertaining (considering Katie’s experience, that might have made them more so - stupid aging process!).

The counterpart show happened in the parking garage after the main event. First let me say that out of everyone I saw there (and I did a lot of people watching during the intermission), I didn’t see a single other similarly aged person in the audience. Everyone in the balcony section other than me was over 30, most over 50. There were apparently some children downstairs according to some comments by Glenn, but he clarified that the “young folks” in the audience consisted of anyone under 50. I’m sad that there weren’t any students in the balcony where they usually dominate (student tickets, ya know)… I got some strange looks and imagined people muttering to each other, ‘what does that lad think he’s going to see, rap stars?’ Anyway… After the show the parking garage was full of half-blind old people trying their hardest to run into me, support pillars or other half-blind old people. While being in the obvious view of one woman, and while she was looking in my direction over her shoulder, she started backing up… and backing up, and backing up straight at me! I was pinned between cars before and behind me, so I just laid down on my horn and she reluctantly stopped, adjusted her glasses and shifted into park (blocking most of the lane). Someone came around a corner and nearly ran into me at 5 MPH while I was opening my car door — and no, my car was nowhere close to in the way, they just apparently didn’t know how to turn their car… It was a sight to see of old people with absolutely no courtesy and no qualms with honking or cutting people off in the most ingenious ways.

The security camera footage for that after-show show would probably sell well, too…

Sadly, my wrist is paining me and desiring a halt to typing and some sleep, so I’ll have to cut this short. Look for more tomorrow.

I went with E., April and Theresa tonight to see Orson Scott Card speak at the Alachua County Public Library Headquarters. I’d fully intended to write down everything that he said which was awesome when I returned to my computer, but I have an aching head due to a very upsetting head-cold which I have nursed since Saturday, and I want nothing more right now than to lie in bed with painkillers. Oh, I need to take some of those, hang on — (Max Payne-style pillcandy crunching is heard) — ah, good.

Much of his talk was on education, how he educated himself and just how badly U.S. public schools really are in the present day. A lot of his points echo Christina Hoff Sommers’ The War Against Boys which I read about a year and a half ago (I think Katie’s family has my copy of the book. As far as I know only James and I have read it so far, but anyone’s welcome to have at it for an interesting and entertaining (in all the wrong ways!) read), but he wasn’t talking about just the one sex, and was talking specifically about how our education system is set up presently to fail to teach children how to read.

Okay, my head says enough is enough. I took some pictures and even some video, maybe tomorrow I’ll get both online.

Mr. Card is an engaging and very entertaining speaker. Woohoo and thanks for coming, sir! Now I have to re-read Ender’s Game…

Must go to bed now so to wake up very, very early… but I saw 42nd street tonight at the Phillips Center and it was awesome. The lady cast as the lead, Peggy, was phenomenal. Her name was Mara something (but not Mara Jade, no). Anyway, maybe I’ll blog more about it once I get home tomorrow for Thanksgiving!

Ominous!

Being as I love Spooner and Roxie, and that someone near and dear to my heart enjoys their escapades as well, I went ahead and this morning ordered all four Spooner comic books. Unfortunately only two are released at the moment, so I’ll be getting the last two in July and August, but that’s tolerable.

Happy Friday everybody! Remember: “By the time they had diminished from 50 to 8, the other dwarves began to suspect “Hungry.” – a Larson cartoon

Liz loaned me her copies of MegaTokyo volume 1 and 2 last weekend and I’ve just finished them up (after finishing The Dilbert Principle. ). I give a majorly big thumbs up. Some things made a lot more sense when reading the whole thing through with the ability to “random access” the images — e.g., thumb back ten pages and check something. In particular, the drawings I felt were simply random(the single-panel ones with titles like “leftbehindinemptyplaces”) now are a part of the story.

Volume 1 with the extra comments at the bottom of most of the pages was just hilarious… But then again, I think Shirt Guy Dom is awesome, so my tastes may well be discarded as “invalid.” Volume 2 is much more mature than 1, and just an engrossing story — even though I’ve been reading MegaTokyo online since comic number 6.

Now, I’m heading off to the U.K. and France for a couple weeks in a month. So I’ll be off making my way in unfamiliar countries where they don’t speak my language (redneck). Like Piro and Largo. But I’m not a big manga fan (and I’m not going to Nippon…) and I won’t be buying computer parts (very many, at least). So what could go wrong?

I can see it now. I’m going to be in England, the land of Arthur and Merlin and random people like them. The last stomping grounds of the Men of Númenor. Though my hotel and food bills will be in desperate need of paying, I’ll spend all my money on Ale and Whores!

I’m looking forward to it.

The broadway version of The Sound of Music came here to Gainesville, and I attended tonight. Unfortunately I picked up a bad headache at the end and retain it now, so forgive this being a brief review.

And now, the review: I was more entertained by this production than I have ever been by the movie.

So… hurrah! Huzzah and all that, even!

And… James and I went to the faire today for a few hours. T’was fun. Now to take some medicine and lay down.